Learning from research Seminar: Critical Discourse Analysis and Professional Identity in Social Work

Would you like to enhance your social work knowledge base and evidence-based practice experience?

Do you want to learn more about research taking place in the region and how it can inform your social work practice?

We know that evidence-based practice is crucial to good social work. It helps keep us professionally curious. However, in the busy world of front line social work, we know that it can be challenging to keep up to date with the latest research, to make sense of it and understand how it applies to the day to day issues that social workers deal with. The West Midlands Social Work Teaching Partnership is committed to developing links between research and practice in social work. We want to support practitioners to engage with research that can help them with the real-world issues they work with daily.

We are therefore hosting a series of quarterly Learning from Research Seminars which will feature a researcher who will present a piece of research with key findings and messages for contemporary social work practice. Time is also allowed for questions and reflections for learning and moving forwards. These sessions will provide learning for both adults and children’s practitioners, with opportunity to feedback some messages from practice to help inform future research.

The next session is titled ‘Critical Discourse Analysis and Professional Identity in Social Work’ and is presented by Dr Karen Roscoe, Assistant Professor and Course Director for MA in Social Work at Coventry University.

The use of discourse and narrative research methods in the exploration of occupational cultures provides researchers with ways in which to explore how professional identity is mediated and understood against policy objectives. This seminar explores the language of learners and practitioners who worked in Adult services in Wales and considers the implications for professional identity and practice. The seminar aims to analyse the extent to which this language may have changed or developed in Adult services  within competing discourses such as ‘strengths-based’ or ‘person centred’. The seminar concludes by outlining a critically reflexive method for identifying the more marginalised and varied discourses of social work which is based on the recently published paper Roscoe, K.D. (2023) Critical Discourse Analysis: a dialectical approach to deconstructing professional identity in social work’, Critical and Radical Social Work, Policy Press (in print).

Practitioners will learn:

• Discourse and narrative approaches to research; 
• How wider language contained in policy impacts upon practice in specific ways; 
• How to identify more marginalised and international perspectives in social work; 
• Reflect upon the competing discourses available within social work and consider their impact upon identity.

At the time of the PhD study both students’ and practitioners’ assessment activity centred around the ‘personalisation agenda’, which remains the main policy and practice approach for adult social  work. This is firmly embedded in Welsh and UK law through the implementation of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 and the UK Care Act 2014. Both Acts and their guidance dictate how social work professionals should apply self-directed, outcome-focused and ‘person-centred care’ (Department of Health, 2010).

This session is only available to members of the West Midlands Social Work Teaching Partnership, and people with lived experience who are linked to one of our partner organisations.